We’re in the midst of one the biggest software and hardware revolutions we’ve ever witnessed. With processing power, storage and bandwidth increasing exponentially, smartphones and smart tablets are quickly becoming our main personal and business computer. Customers, employees and other stakeholders are bringing and using their smartphones and tablets everywhere, and that definitely impacts how they see and interact with your door dealership online.

For businesses of all sizes, this means it’s time to take a good look at your website. Sure, your site might look great on a desktop or laptop computer screen, but how does it look on all the different sizes of screens found on today’s wide variety of tablets and smartphones? Chances are the answer is “not good.” That’s why all companies need to make their site adaptive and design them for mobile first.

Building an Adaptive Website

To address the mobile revolution, many companies have created a second mobile version of their website so their content can be viewed on smartphones without a problem. But there are big problems! First, you have to design, maintain and pay for two separate websites. When you update one, the other is, in most cases, not automatically updated. Additionally, the mobile site is designed for a specific mobile-screen size. If your user doesn’t have that phone model, he’ll still have to scroll around to see your mobile site version.

To get a better idea of why a traditionally designed website doesn’t work for mobile devices, try this little experiment. Using a laptop or desktop, go to your company’s website. Depending on the size of your screen, the website will either fill the entire screen or there will be a border on the right and left side.

Using your mouse arrow, grab the bottom right corner of the browser window for your website. Drag it from the right to the left diagonally up, and start making the window smaller. If your website is not adaptive, you’ll see that all you’re really doing is covering things up. And as soon as the window gets smaller than the predefined width of the site, you’ll see scrollbars appear on the right and bottom. Now the only way to move around on the page is to scroll.

Keep making the window smaller until it’s about the size of a smartphone screen. How does it look? You’ll see it probably doesn’t look good at all. As a matter of fact, it’s probably not useful either.

If your website was adaptive, as you move that window and make it smaller, the text would automatically reformat and the pictures would move accordingly to fit the smaller screen size. The menu would also adapt and change so your website and content would work on any device.